"Brooklyn" star Saoirse Ronan would welcome winning an Oscar

Saoirse Ronan would welcome a second Oscar nomination with open arms, but she’s not holding her hopes up too high even though the reviews for her film Brooklyn are positively glowing.

Brooklyn officially hits theaters on November 6, and movie-goers are sure to be captivated by 21-year-old Saoirse’s portrayal of a young woman in fifties Ireland who is torn between her home there and the new life she established for herself in New York.

Brooklyn will hit all the major film fests before it bows, and reviewers at this week’s Toronto Film Fest fell in love with the movie which also co-stars Domhnall Gleeson. When asked by Toronto’s NOW magazine about a likely second Oscar nod – her first came for Atonement in 2007 when she was only 13 – Ronan said she’ll wait and see.

“When Atonement happened I was a kid, so I wasn’t really aware of all the Oscar talk, but it worked out and it was great,” she says.

“But I’ve also been on the other side, where there’s so much buzz before a film’s even made and then it doesn’t have that kind of success when it’s released. So I know how unpredictable these things can be.

“But listen, Jesus, it would be absolutely amazing for the film to get recognized. Even the fact that some people are talking about it in those terms is a dream. Whether it happens or not.”

Born in New York in 1994 to undocumented Irish parents, Paul and Monica Ronan returned to Co. Carlow Saoirse was three. Paul Ronan was a theater actor of note in New York, and featured in Brad Pitt’s 1992 IRA film The Devil’s Own.

It wasn’t easy for her folks, Saoirse said, and she credits them with giving her a sense of what’s real.

“They went over and didn’t have degrees or anything like that. They went over to work, to graft,” she says.

“My dad did all sorts of jobs, construction and things like that. At literally at one point he actually shoveled s*** out of an elevator shaft at the Waldorf Hotel, which he only told me about recently.”

Her parents gave their only child many things, chief among them a U.S. passport.

“In the states they are very strict when it comes to visas. My mom was adamant that I wouldn’t have to go through what they went through. My American passport is golden to me,” Saoirse says. Donald Trump take note!